


Achilles Come Down

by IntoTheRiverStyx



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depression, Destiny, Heavy Angst, M/M, No Dialogue, One Shot, POV First Person, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:35:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27121903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IntoTheRiverStyx/pseuds/IntoTheRiverStyx
Summary: Bedivere comes home to a familiar scene - one he has grown to loathe despite the love he still holds. In this loneliness that threatens to strip him of his sense of self, he wonders what he means to the world, what he could have done different.He wonders if this all matters, in the end. His fate has always been - and will always be - tied to Kay, no matter how far gone Kay has become.
Relationships: Bedivere/Kay (Arthurian)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Achilles Come Down

I came home from work to find Kay sleeping. It was not a sleep that had been found through means I would have preferred, but it was still sleep. I may have wept years ago at the state he was in, but years have a way of eroding the rawness of pain, whittling it down to something not unlike resignation.

We'd started this nearly fifteen years before, this searching for Kay's foster-brother who'd become King. We were so young and so full of hope. We traveled the world, picking up odd jobs and sleeping in places far more dangerous than this one-room apartment, but now the past felt safer, felt less crazed than...whatever we'd become.

There were libraries to comb through and places we knew Arthur had been, had waged war and foraged peace on the graves of nameless soldiers who'd given their lives for a misguided King who under-estimated our boy-King. But now, with the Internet morphing from an esoteric art to household essential, Kay had lost his drive to try to comb through the world in-person. At the time, I had been so naive, so _young_ and I'd been excited about the idea of staying in one place.

To forage a life with Kay, together, in a world that looked like we'd be able to _be a family in public_ instead of hiding who we were at our most basic components? I'd've given anything – **lost anything** – for that chance.

If I knew I'd be losing Kay to this mad search of his and the lengths he went to in the name of maximizing his search? 

I do not know. Perhaps I would have been less eager, or more careful, or both. Perhaps I would have outright refused, pretended I loved the idea of traveling forever more than I did the idea of being a proper family. Perhaps I would have even thrown myself down the same path he'd lost himself on, if for no other reason than maybe then I would not feel the pain of watching Kay lose his spirit.

I do not know.

Kay could have been anything – anything – this life or others. He had a greatness that ran deeper than bones, but he always chose to nurture it to its zenith so he could be sure he exorcized all of it and left the chasm it created open to fester so that any time he thought of chasing his own legacy instead of Arthur's, he would feel the pain and turn away again. Whether this was misguided penance for sins no god could forgive or the only way Kay knew to ensure he spent his life bound to Arthur whether or not Arthur was given back to the world by the fair folk who kept him, I did not know. 

I could not ask.

He so rarely let me in on what he was feeling, what he was thinking. I'd tried to pry early on, but questions only drove whatever wedge his quest to scour everything that had ever existed for hints of where Arthur may crop up had spun when neither of us were giving the _us_ part of things any attention.

He'd foraged himself into a twenty-first century Achilles, determined to take Troy down brick by brick if it meant victory. I was nowhere near as useful or enduring as Patroclus, but I would have given myself for him over and over and over again if he'd just _let me._ But just as Achilles would always shirk Patroclus for what the stars had given him, so too would I always come second to Kay's devotion to Camelot.

There was no room for me in Kay's quest; I had known this from the time we were boys on Sir Ector's estate. Whatever the world held for Kay, I would forever be following him, keeping an eye out for dangers, both immediate and far-flung. My destiny was to make sure Kay could reach _his_ destiny, and that had not changed.

Only now, I could barely keep him alive _to_ reach whatever destiny he still held onto. Sometimes, it felt like he was a lost Knight, desperate to find his charge and ensure Camelot would rise from the sands of time. The rest of the time, it just felt like he was lost.

Still, I'd promised to stay, promised to guard Kay from the world. I wished often that I had also promised to protect him from himself. I was no oracle, no Cassandra who could find the secrets of the future and tuck them into my soul such that I might save what I loved.

Without Kay, I was no one. It was through him I was ushered into Arthur's innermost court without a second glance, through him I became our King's most trusted War Marshall. And just as Kay had buried himself in Camelot's kitchens such that he could oversee who came and went, know who handled each bit of food, so too did I taste everything Arthur would eat, take the first sip of all Arthur would drink. There would always be another Seneschal, another War Marshall, but there was only one Arthur.

But there was no sharing the burden this time, not in this new world and not without an Arthur to split a burden over. Instead, I worked to pay the bills so Kay could...I could barely even call it searching for Arthur anymore. It was a madness born of desperation and I'd watched him slip into this without knowing what I had witnessed until it was too late to reach out a hand.

I wondered sometimes – perhaps a bit more than sometimes on nights like this, where his sleep was not a natural one and my only company was regret – if he still loved me as he did when we were young, or if love had become complacency, an echo of what we were, distorted by the number of times it bounced off the walls of this apartment.

Damn our promises.

I was not hungry, could not find the will to make dinner, so instead I went about cleaning off the bed, stripping the blankets he never used anymore, the black tar and booze keeping him warm as his heart kept circulating it through his system. I moved as slowly as I could so to not disturb him. The sleep may not have been natural, but that did not mean waking him would not do harm, too.

I swept my hands over the mattress, hoping there were no needles to sneak up on me, stab me when I was trying to prevent exactly that whenever I finally laid down for the night. There was only one tonight, at the foot of the bed where it had been discarded immediately after use. Kay's notebook, though, was under my pillow, forgotten somewhere in the midst of where he was furthest from himself. The scribbles of ideas where he may find his foster-brother, of what Camelot might mean in this new millennia, always shifted into scribbles and artwork that maybe was meant to be Camelot, perhaps one of our fellow Knights. They always struck me like a physical blow would, their faces distorted and their pen-given eyes empty of anything that could have made them worthy of rising with Arthur once more.

Kay seemed to have trapped his sense of self in the sense of guilt he felt over Arthur's early death, a thing he could not change tying him to a life he could never get back. Well, to two lives he could never get back: Arthur, our first time through life, but also himself in the here and now. He did not think of himself as existing without Arthur.

I wished so hard I may as well have prayed to the gods that abandoned us to chance that I could _make_ Kay see the worth he had that was his own. Perhaps then life would be worth living for the sake of itself, not sacrificed its substance for, well, substance of another kind entirely.

There was nothing I could do.

We were heroes from another age who once supported a King who exemplified the divine right of Kings. But our King was missing, perhaps gone, and this was not a world that had room for heroes. We had no voice here, no room to plea for those he might save to watch for our King, be our eyes and ears where we cannot be. We knew this, I still know this, but what of Kay's faith survived being reborn had been transplanted into the Internet and the eyes and ears it let him borrow. He was focused on a world that rendered him inconsequential while I was listening to him. I was watching him now like I should have watched him when he started slipping into...whatever this was.

Loving him when there was so little of him left was horrifying.

There was a time when I could plan every battle such that he survived, moved the heavens themselves such that not even they could touch him. But there were no heavens to move, just hells to walk through with him whether or not he knew he had company in the darkness. Were these hells of another's making, perhaps we could have been Orpheus and Eurydice with enough foresight to put blinders on such that we can both make it home alive.

But no, he is Achilles, his only weakness his inability to take his blinders _off_ and his Troy is Avalon itself. Perhaps he knows this, knows I am his Patroclus and would gladly lay down my life for his and this is why he has sealed himself off from me.

I cannot save him, not from himself, not from the hells he has created as he searches for Arthur. I do not know if he wishes it is Arthur our King or Arthur his foster-brother he wishes was here. I do not know if he -

I do know I cannot tear him away from this self-destruction, and that trying has the opposite effect of my intentions. I do know I can still be of use to him, however little use I may be. I can keep the lights on and keep us in this cursed space ours.

There is nothing more I can do besides wish and hope and _know_.

I wish Achilles had let Troy fall on its own accord.

I wish Kay would let Camelot resurrect itself.

I hope Kay knows that, despite the storm that is his very existence, I love him.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will be the same, creeping past until they blur in with all the rest of my yesterdays.

I will come home from work to find Kay sleeping.


End file.
